musical musings from the frozen north:
torontopia, mont royal city and kawartha kottages

Wednesday, December 09, 2015

2105: Year of the transgressor

1. Buffy Sainte-Marie – Power in the Blood (True
North). There
are plenty of zeitgeist reasons why this tops my list. A successful comeback
from a 74-year-old woman who we all once watched breastfeed on Sesame Street!
With an album that opens with a re-recording of the first track on her first
album, which was released 51 fucking years ago! With songs that directly
reference Idle No More! With guitars that sound as loud as Sleater-Kinney!
Finally, she won the Polaris Music Prize, beating out Drake—and a bunch of
others we didn’t expected to win anyway!

But let’s not confuse the news with the music itself. There are
plenty of reasons why Buffy is boss. It’s her first record in seven years, and
only her third since 1992, so she’s obviously had a lot of time to let these
songs ripen, as she would say, to what we hear here. She also rewrote and
borrowed from songs dating back to the mid-’70s, from a series of (excellent)
albums released during her commercial low. She hired Michael Phillip Wojewoda
(Rheostatics) as one of three producers and to mix the entire project; as a
result, Blood has serious muscle that her recordings have
lacked for decades. Yes, there are guitars louder than any of her
contemporaries, but there is also a wistful country song and a campfire song
reimagined as electronic trance and a song that sounds like a Broadway
musical’s closing number and a Vocoder reminiscent of both Neil Young’s Trans
and T-Pain and … wait, is that a UB40 cover?

The songs are great, many of them earworms. The production and
performances are fantastic. But what puts this on top is the fact that I still
get chills listening to certain tracks; some get me teary on a regular basis.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one. Power in the Blood lifts her up where
she belongs—at the top.

2. Sleater-Kinney – No Cities to Love (Sub Pop). If you’re going to
reunite, you’d better go big or go home. Which is why the ladies in
Sleater-Kinney came howling back from a hiatus with a roar of a record that
made me wonder whether I’d actually enjoyed any rock music at all in recent
years. Pretty sure I didn’t—at least not compared to this.

3. Mbongwana Star – From Kinshasa (Nonesuch). When a young
Congolese guitarist steeped in psychedelia gets together with an Irish
electronic producer and two older Kinshasa men who toured the world with a band
comprised of formerly homeless polio victims who made their own instruments
(Staff Benda Bilili), you get a thoroughly trippy and modern mashup that
transcends all boundaries. Original review here.

4. Whitehorse – Leave No Bridge Unburned (Six Shooter). Two veteran
performers join forces and put out a better album than either one ever did as a
solo artist—that would be Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland’s debut as
Whitehorse, one of the best records of 2012. This time out their producer (Gus
Van Go) told them to go home and write better songs—and they did. Spaghetti
Western guitar, Pixies riffs, Bo Diddley beats, country swing and rockabilly
rave-ups all served with the best male-female harmonies this side of Low. Original
review here.

5. Vince Staples – Summertime ’06 (Def Jam). Vince Staples—no
hyperbolic handle here, just his birth name—is a 21-year-old MC from Long Beach
rapping about thug life. That he does so better than most is not that unusual.
But it’s the music behind him, produced largely by Kanye West acolyte No I.D.,
that puts Staples’s debut album miles ahead of every other hip-hop album this
year—yes, even Kendrick’s, which for all its ambition, doesn’t exactly leave
room to breathe. Some beats recall the best work No I.D. has done for Kanye,
Pusha T and Common; some are to-be-expected sonic signposts of 2015. But others
draw heavily on Latin rhythms, post-punk dub reggae, goth new wave, late-night
Isaac Hayes soul, New Orleans funk, Aphex Twin—literally anything goes here.
But Staples and his crew keep it sparse, never suffocating his flow, never
feeling the need to do everything all the time. Original review here.

6. Terra Lightfoot – Every Time My Mind Runs Wild (Sonic
Unyon).
Well, that was quite the year, wasn’t it? In December 2014, practically no one
knew the name of this Hamilton singer-songwriter. Released in April, this album
got her into all the right summer festivals, where she slayed audiences and
peers at every turn. She was invited to play Massey Hall and with the Hamilton
Orchestra and she sang with the reunited Rheostatics. It’s all because of her
powerhouse performance on this record, where her unique, androgynous voice
shines and soars, where she made a point of letting everyone know that she
plays all the guitars, where she asserts herself as one of the only people in
60 years of rock’n’roll who know how to kick ass in waltz time, where every
barnburner rocker is matched by a devastatingly beautiful ballad like “NFB.” It
was a very good year. Original review here.

7. Alabama Shakes – Sound and Color (ATO).Sound and Color opens with the sound
of—wait a minute, what? Vibraphone and upright bass. Then, over a slow,
syncopated beat and a string section, Howard slips into a sonic rapture,
emulating Prince and Al Green, singing about synaesthesia and sounding
splendorous while doing so. It’s slow-burn, psychedelic soul, and it’s your
first clue that this is not a garage rock record. Brittany Howard’s voice
explores masculine depths and what sounds like soaring falsetto—many of the
slow jams here owe some debts to fellow Southern soul space cadets D’Angelo and
Erykah Badu. She snarls like the Strokes on “The Greatest”; she slinks like
Norah Jones on “This Feeling.” The music keeps you guessing: just when you
think it’s going to be an R&B record, some Southern rock takes over. Just
when you think it’s going to be ballad-heavy, a rave-up comes next. On the
penultimate track “Gemini,” things get downright spacey and trippy for more
than six minutes, like a Funkadelic deep cut, culminating in a fuzzed-out,
droning guitar solo. Full review here.

8. Michelle McAdorey –
Into Her Future (DWR). One of the most
underrated, nearly forgotten bands of the late ’80s and early ’90s is Crash
Vegas, who put out three equally excellent and drastically different records
during their time together. While guitarist Colin Cripps went on to play with
Kathleen Edwards and Blue Rodeo (and now fronts the ace instrumental group
C+C), singer Michelle McAdorey put out two understated, experimental folk
records about 15 years ago and then retreated to raise a family. This comeback
reunites her with Crash Vegas co-founder Greg Keelor; not surprisingly, it
sounds similar to the 1989 debut, Red
Earth, steeped in British folk rock and psychedelic country. “This life
goes by like a fast wind,” she sings. Which is why it’s such a joy to have such
a talent as hers blow back into our lives.

9. Geoff Berner – We Are Going to Bremen to Be Musicians
(Coax).
In which the veteran Vancouver accordionist and purveyor of radical Jewish
culture pulls out all the stops, with his most acerbic satire to date (and
that’s saying something) matched with a killer band and Socalled’s production,
all of which dares us to laugh in spite at the horrors and hypocrisies of the
world. While most musicians are content to couch their politics in vagaries,
Berner goes directly for the jugular—and invites us all to drink the wine. Full
review here.

10.Miguel – Wildheart
(Sony).
In a year when the cocaine-fuelled revenge porn of The Weeknd was considered
sexy and suitable for prime time, thank God we have Miguel. Wildheart is sensual and sumptuous,
collapsing the last 50 years of R&B, from the psychedelic period to Prince
to Frank Ocean, into California dreams and sunbaked sonic textures. Original
review is here.

11. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (Universal). “Loving you is
complicated.” Sure is, when you make an album this ambitious, this eclectic, an
album filled with urgency and political bile and insight and—oh my God, it
sounds like the guy is in such a hurry to stuff everything in there that he’s
going to have a breakdown. Oh wait! He actually is having a breakdown! To
Pimp a Butterfly is an incredible work of art and a zeitgeist record of
2015, but it can also be suffocating and unnecessarily dense; even the most
buoyant tracks here are often joyless (exception: “King Kunta”). I’m only
saying all of this because every other year-end list where this appears at the
top will tell you How Important It Is—which is absolutely true, for reasons both
lyrical and musical. But it’s not a record I’m ever likely to throw on for
pleasure. My original review here.
Highly recommended further reading (not by me, by Justin Charity) about the
“must-read” album of 2015 is here.

12. Nozinja – Nozinja Lodge (Warp). This is the most
exuberant beat music I’ve ever heard in my life, but I wouldn’t begin to know
how to dance to it; these BPMs will break your legs, guaranteed. Instead, I’ll
just stand here and shiver and quake and vibrate and let those tumbling drums
and percussive synth sounds wash over me, the strange shangaan synthesis of
South African township jive and ’90s jungle and modern EDM adding up to a
glorious cacophony. Original review here.

13. Scott Merritt – Of (independent). If this was merely a
perfectly arranged and produced album performed primarily on the much-maligned
ukulele, it would be one thing to hear Merritt’s magical hands extract delicacy
and intricacy out of those four strings. But when a songwriter of Merritt’s
calibre saves up more than a decade of sketches and brings them to fruition,
we’re obviously witness to the best the man has to offer. For a record with no
percussion and comprised largely of languid tempos, the rhythms are pulsing and
surprisingly strong on a such a quiet record, with the Cowboy Junkies’ secret
weapon, Jeff Bird, playing judicious upright bass. There’s a song on here,
“Meteor,” that I first heard Merritt play live more than 10 years ago—and I
instantly remembered the melody and lyric vividly. Surely, I thought, I know
this song from a previous album? Nope. That song stuck with me, with only one
impression, for more than a decade. Always a good sign.

14. Tunde Olaniran –
Transgressor (Quite Scientific).Didn’t see this one coming: is the best debut
album of 2015 from a genre-hopping Nigerian-American from Flint, Michigan, who
grew up in Germany and the U.K., and works at Planned Parenthood by day while
making music that’s an amalgam of Missy Elliott, Santigold, Danny Brown and
Rick James? Oh, and he also designs the costumes for his live dancers, for whom
he does the choreography. He’s an outstanding singer—as good or better than The
Weeknd’s Abel Tesfaye or Gnarls Barkley’s Cee-Lo Green, the two singers he resembles
the most—and a decent rapper. But it’s his production that sets him far apart,
infusing what is ostensibly modern R&B with New Orleans bounce and Peter
Gabriel-ish art rock and Kanye-level avant-garde soundscapes and gospel backing
vocals and huge pop hooks with the odd banjo or kalimba thrown in for good
measure. Full review here.

15. Torres – Sprinter (Arts and Crafts). ’90s grunge
revivalism sucks. Who is going to redeem the real legacy of Nirvana, of the
Breeders, of PJ Harvey, of the weirdoes who whispered and howled and had eerie
pop melodies under crushing electric guitars? 24-year-old Mackenzie Scott performs
and records as Torres, and her latest record is produced by Rob Ellis of PJ
Harvey’s band. The music is monstrous, and the lyrics detail turmoil to match. “There’s freedom to
and freedom from,” she sings, “freedom to run from everyone,” and much of Sprinter
is about running away from sour situations and grappling with unresolved
emotional baggage. Full review here.

16. Courtney Barnett –
Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I
Just Sit (Sony). “Put me on a pedestal, I’ll only disappoint you!” The best
chorus lyric of 2015 put a self-deprecating sentiment on top of a crushing
grunge anthem, and could easily set this Australian singer up to be a novelty
one-hit wonder. Her deadpan vocals and seemingly stream-of-consciousness lyrics
suggest a slacker who’d be happy never to stray far from her Melbourne home—but
there’s far too much craft here for that to be true, from her clever couplets
to the fact that her songs owe as much to Lucinda Williams and Lou Reed as they
do to Kurt Cobain or Pavement. Often after a pedestal-ascending debut album
like this, disappointment is all that’s left—but that seems highly unlikely in
this case. Original review here.

17. Majical Cloudz – Are You Alone? (Arts and Crafts).“What’s the point of a
sad, sad song?” asks Devon Welsh, the man with the odd inclination to call his
musical project Majical Cloudz. The point, young man, is as old as the blues
itself—and though Welsh’s music owes more to Brian Eno and Blade Runner
than it does Robert Johnson or Howlin’ Wolf. Yet Welsh’s incantations are as
ghostly and haunting as any blues, though his lyrics are very 21st-century
confessional, a mix of maudlin moroseness and emo earnestness, populated by
“red wine and sleeping pills … cheap sex and sad films.” Welsh has a natural
magnetism, a voice strong enough to sell the material—which consistently
conjures feelings of a 3 a.m. soul-baring session with some stranger with whom
you just bonded at a bar. The vocals are uncomfortably bare against a sparse
sonic backdrop of droning organs, swooshing synths and arrhythmic electronic
beats. In his videos, Welsh likes to stare directly into the camera for three
straight minutes; his record achieves the same effect aurally. Full review here.

18. Afiara Quartet and
Skratch Bastid – Spin Cycle
(Centrediscs).String quartets have an inherently nimble nature that all small
ensembles do, which makes their work easier to isolate and pull
apart—especially if you’re doing so with their complete participation. DJ
Skratch Bastid will take an eight-bar riff and loop it, then take the violin
line and make it sing in new ways with pitch shifting, while bringing in
sampled drums and keyboards and anything else he likes. Obviously the remixes
are the real draw here, but the original works—by Dinuk Wijeratne, Laura
Silberberg, Rob Teehan and Kevin Lau—stand entirely on their own merit, and not
just as remix fodder. It’s there that Afiara shows off their subtle and dynamic
side, where they prove that they’re not just brash players who secretly want to
be in a rock band. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Full review here.

19. Destroyer – Poison Season (Merge).Poison Season sounds like Dan
Bejar’s greatest hits, reinterpreted by his fiery band of the last five years:
trumpeter JP Carter (Dan Mangan), saxophonist Joseph Shabason (Diana), Black
Mountain drummer Josh Wells and long-time collaborators Nick Bragg (guitar),
David Carswell (guitar), Ted Bois (keys) and John Collins (bass). But it is
hardly just a journey to the past: it’s about Bejar—an artist who muses openly,
on and off his records, about the frivolity of the music business and
insecurity about his own muse—being completely comfortable in his own skin,
finessing the finest points from his discography and pushing toward the future
without changing the core of what has made him so compelling for the last 20
years. Full review here.

20. Lianne La Havas – Blood (Warner). It’s hard to top
Miguel in the sexy record category, but this woman comes close. A class act,
from start to finish, who shares space with Shirley Bassey, Mary J. Blige and
Janelle Monae. Original review here.

Runners-up, in alphabetical order:

Couer de Pirate – Roses (Dare to Care). Beatrice Martin’s
peppy, glossy pop is not entirely my cup of meat, but I feel like there’s an
objective excellence here, in songcraft, production and performance. Much has
been made about the fact that more than half these songs are in English, not
her native French, but I’d be surprised if these weren’t hits in any language. Full
review here.

Keita Juma – Chaos Theory (independent).Chaos Theory
is a hip-hop haunted house, Timbaland on acid, the MC spitting verse in a
fun-house mirror. Keita Juma’s beats generally bounce all over the place; he’s
a wildly inventive producer who often changes direction entirely in the middle
of a track—check the avant-garde “YReWeOnThisBeach,” where the relaxed,
charismatic MC finds himself adrift in the Canadian wilderness, searching for
inspiration. Wherever he finds it, Keita Juma manages to create truly haunting,
hallucinogenic hip-hop, the likes of which is all too rare in this country or
anywhere else. Full review here.

Jean Leloup – À Paradis City (Grosse Boîte).A Paradis City is such a refreshing,
welcoming record: Leloup, a huge rock star in his native Quebec, writes
anthemic songs that never succumb to bombast or weighty instrumentation—even
when he calls in the choirs or string sections. There are quiet folk songs
here, midtempo rockers, and a triumphant title track that shows, among other
things, how much Sam Roberts learned from Leloup. Full review here.

Mac McCaughan – Non-Believers (Merge).Words you will never
hear in the Durham, N.C., offices of Merge Records: “Oh crap, the boss wants us
to put out another one of his own records.” The Superchunk frontman made his
name playing incredibly loud, overdriven punk guitar and singing slightly
higher than his range would allow: here, he lets his lower range luxuriate,
takes guitar inspiration from ’80s Brits like Johnny Marr and Robert Smith, and
his overall aesthetic from New Zealand like The Clean, the Tall Dwarfs and the
3Ds. This is the best record he’s made in years. Full review here.

Tami Nielsen – Dynamite! (Outside). Nielsen, a Canadian
expat who’s built a career in New Zealand, is a throwback; everything on this,
her first Canadian release, is steeped in ’50s rockabilly and Nashville, and
she’s got it down pat: the bare-bones production, the ace band, and a
showstopper of a voice that could fill any room without a microphone. Her
lyrics might be well-worn tropes—songs about a heart the size of Texas and
lipstick on your collar—but the melodies, arrangements, and especially her
Patsy Cline-esque vocals are all fantastic. Full review here.

Siskiyou – Nervous (Constellation).Sure sounds nervous.
Anxious, even. Worried. And yet determined to plough through whatever weird
situation we all find ourselves in, surrounded by spooky soundscapes on this,
the third album by Vancouver’s Siskiyou. Fronted by former Great Lake Swimmers
drummer Colin Huebert (and featuring that band’s string player, Erik Arnesen),
Siskiyou maintains a tension throughout Nervous, regardless of tempo or
arrangement, major key or minor. Opening track “Deserter” begins with a
haunting children’s choir, leading into a bass line borrowed from The Cure’s
“Fascination Street” before Huebert’s hushed vocals begin the verses. The tune
gets more animated as it proceeds, with the choir singing off-beat shots, Colin
Stetson’s baritone sax taking the solo, and ending with a ghostly coda with
just Huebert and electric guitar. Full review here.

Kamasi Washington – The Epic (Brainfeeder). The bandleader for
Kendrick Lamar’s jazz excursions blows everyone away with this triple album
featuring his eight-piece band, a 32-piece orchestra, a 20-person choir and a
variety of styles that showcase not only his skills but his songwriting. The
Epic, indeed. Full review here.

Tony Wilson 6tet – A Day’s Life (Drip Audio). Some of Canada’s
finest improve players assemble for this suite of songs by this Vancouver
guitarist: 2015 MVP JP Carter (Destroyer, Siskiyou, Dan Mangan), Tanya Tagaq
sideman Jesse Zubot, cellist Peggy Lee, Skye Brooks on drums and Russell
Sholberg on bass. The album is meant as a portrait of their hometown’s troubled
Downtown Eastside, and the delicate dance of life that plays out there. So we
get plaintive, melodic moments, bursts of noise and chaos, and dips into
traditional jazz and country, with each of these masters complementing each
other perfectly. Original review here.

Young Guv – Ripe 4 Luv (Slumberland). Not what you might
expect from a guitarist in Fucked Up: these eight summery pop songs, most sung in a
falsetto and with Teenage Fanclub harmonies, sound like they belong on some
1982 AM-radio mix tape with Prince, Rick Springfield, Adam Ant and Lindsey
Buckingham. Things take a slightly weirder turn on closing track Wrong Crowd,
with its meandering saxophone and someone mumbling in French over a pseudo-Sade
groove. Full review here.

Album that would likely top this list if I was 25 years old: Titus Andronicus – The Most Lamentable Tragedy (Merge). Reviewed here.

Album that would likely be on this list but that I’ve purposely
avoided until I have some down time to actually absorb it, as well as see her
in concert next week: Joanna Newsom – Divers (Drag City).

5 albums of 2014 that I didn’t discover and/or fully appreciate until
2015, and subsequently played to death: